README.md

Data Analysis for the #takemymoneyHBO trend on Twitter

Earlier today, Jake Caputo
created a website, Take My Money HBO that lets
people tweet how much they would be willing to pay
for a standalone HBOGO streaming service.

I was curious about what the average amount of money
would be, so I wrote two small Python
scripts that use the Twitter search API to retrieve
the 1500 most recent tweets (the limits of the API)
and analyse the average amount in those tweets.

There are limitations to this approach, since there are
certainly more than 1500 tweets with this hashtag. I
made the following decisions about how I handled the data:

RTs were ignored, because I'm interested in each person's
personal opinion.

I looked for the phrase 'pay $' in the tweet, and extracted
the number following the '$'. If there was no number following,
the tweet was ignored (e.g. some people tweeted statements
like 'I would pay $$$'.

Money amounts >$50 were ignore, since some people tweeted
statements like 'I would pay $1000000'.

Currently the script only returns the average amount and the
number of data points available of the 1500 downloaded (after
RTs, etc are removed).

Results

Wednesday 5:10AM GMT/UTC +0:00 - $12.06, from 1063 data points.

Wednesday 5:24AM GMT/UTC +0:00 - $12.30, from 1071 data points.

Remix This

These (very simple) scripts are released under the permissive MIT license,
so download them, run them yourself, and modify them to extract
more interesting data - e.g. draw graphs.